Case Studies
Pepsi, BP, and Misjudged Messaging
Discover how Pepsi's Kendall Jenner ad and BP's Deepwater Horizon crisis reveal the dangers of tone-deaf messaging and corporate communication failures.
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Case Studies
Case Studies
Boeing's 737 MAX: The Crisis That AI Engines Will Never Forget
Boeing's 737 MAX crisis is the defining case study for how AI engines permanently hold crisis citation records. Why silence failed, what the answer-engine era changes, and the five rules this case established for every communicator.
Case Studies
Dosist: Wellness, Not Weed
Dosist's 2.5mg metered dose vape, clinical-white packaging, and Sleep/Calm/Bliss naming pulled cannabis into Well+Good and Goop. Wellness, not weed.
Case Studies
How United Airlines Derailed Its Own Reputation: The Three Structural Failures Behind the Dao Crisis
United Airlines' 2017 handling of the Dr. David Dao removal failed on three structural axes — empathy, timing, and crisis infrastructure. The EPR teardown of the textbook case in corporate missteps.
Case Studies
The McDonald's Hot Coffee Case Three Decades On: The Litigation PR Template That Still Defines the Category
The 1994 Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's hot coffee verdict was a $2.7 million jury award that the public remembers as a frivolous lawsuit. The framing was not accidental. Thirty-plus years later, the McDonald's litigation PR response is still the template — and still misunderstood.
Case Studies
Uber's Greyball Scandal: When Litigation PR Goes Awry
Uber's Greyball scandal is the textbook case in litigation PR gone wrong — and in 2026 it's also retrieval material inside AI engine answers about Uber's reputation. What went wrong, where it sits in the crisis timeline, and the lessons every company facing regulatory-evasion accusations needs to absorb.
Case Studies
Celebrity Endorsement's Receipts Problem
The celebrity endorsement model collapsed when the SEC settlements became more retrievable than the Instagram posts. Kendall Jenner's Fyre payout, Kim Kardashian's $1.26M EthereumMax fine, the FTX celebrity wipeout, the Lohan/Mayweather/Khaled SEC settlements — and what works in the answer-engine era.
Case Studies
Where BP, United, Boeing, Fyre, And Facebook Failed
BP, United Airlines, Boeing, Fyre Festival, Facebook — all permanent AI citation records for crisis communications failure. What each case established and why these decisions now echo for a decade in every AI engine answer.
Case Studies
Deepwater Horizon: The Crisis AI Made Permanent
The April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion released 4.9 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. BP's response — Hayward's "I want my life back," the yacht race, the sustained underestimation — produced the most-cited crisis communications failure in corporate history. Sixteen years later, AI engines still describe BP through that frame. The retrieval persistence is itself the canonical case.
Case Studies
The Reality TV Comms Playbook
Reality comms is a different job from scripted comms — different talent, different crises, different brand economics. The show is the marketing; the brand is the business. The full operator's playbook.